Wine tastings are popular events that are enjoyed both on a commercial and non-commercial basis. At the one extreme, various organizations are known to put on large scale events to rate vintages offered by different wine labels, and sometimes these events are open to the public for their enjoyment as well. These festivals are extremely popular and attract large crowds interested in wines. Individual wineries also offer tastings of their products on a small scale for the benefit of visitors. These functions allow wineries to collect data directly from consumers on the likeability of different types of wine.
Finally, at the public level, so-called private “wine tasting parties” represent yet another form of entertainment and enjoyment that is popular at this time. At such functions, individuals are invited to taste, discuss and rate wines as part of the social activities. Such parties are becoming more commonplace, but the wineries and other vendors associated with such products have not been able to tap into the information exchanged at such events.
There are some Internet/e-commerce entities also dedicated to wine and related products. For example a website identified as www.winelog.net is dedicated to wine lovers and includes a tool for members to enter their wine ratings and receive recommendations. Winelog describes itself as an “online community of wine drinkers.” The limitation of this site is that it caters only to persons who have taken the time to find the site and have registered specifically as members. This tends to restrict the community to hard core oenophiles. Moreover it does not appear to coordinate and tie together the collected ratings data for wine growers, consumers and merchants of such products. Consequently the user population and popularity of such system does not appear to be significant.
Thus techniques for collecting data for food/drink preferences have been rather limited. It would be preferable if there were some manner of increasing the participation rate in the general public to enhance knowledge of consumer preferences.